Sleep and His Brother Read online

  “Oh, yes,” said Pibble. He understood very clearly the only facet of the affair that mattered to him these days. In the hierarchy of that coffee morning Lady Sospice would have been top, Mrs. Dixon-Jones about third or fourth, and “dear Mary” well down in the double figures. Lady Sospice was known to be a tedious old tease. When Mary had charged unwanted into a chat among the upper echelons, the patron had amused herself by demoting Mrs. Dixon-Jones to the indignity of haggling over diaries with Mary, who, hungry for gossip and vaguely trying to conjure up some kind of retirement therapy for her poor sacked husband, had refused to be put off. So Pibble had wasted a good windless morning, ideal for spraying the roses with an early winter wash; and he would have to waste several evenings trying to iron the creases out of Mary’s calm. That was all that affected him now, so why should he worry if it wasn’t all that affected Mrs. Dixon-Jones?

  “That’s all right,” he said, beginning to shuffle out of his chair.

  “I thought you’d probably understand,” said Mrs. Dixon-Jones. She tapped at the tiny world again.

  “Don’t move,” said Pibble. “I can find my own way out.”

  “Good-bye.”

  Her sharp smile pinned him through the thorax, another specimen in her collection of insects.

  “Give my love to Mary,” she added.

  “Of course.”

  For Mary’s sake he almost broke his submission. For instance, he could have remarked, casually, on … He probably would have, too, in the days when he still had a job, and colleagues, and some self-esteem.

  As he reached out his hand for it, the door handle turned slowly. Slowly the door crept into the room; knowing what the movement meant, Pibble stood to one side and waited.

  An enormously fat boy, a lad who could have modelled for Master Bones the Butcher’s Son, seeped into sight. By his tight dark curls Pibble knew that this was the one who had been lying asleep on the sofa, dreaming (perhaps) of gold fish in dirty water.

  “Why, Tony!” said Mrs. Dixon-Jones in a voice suddenly floppy. She reached down a large ledger from the top of the shabby old telephone switchboard behind her, flipped it open, ran a quick finger down a column, and said, “You didn’t have your supper last night, Tony. Or your breakfast this morning.”

  “Biscuit,” said Tony.

  His voice had the same light, unbroken timbre as the doorkeepers’, though he must have been three years older. Mrs. Dixon-Jones took a box of assorted chocolate biscuits from a drawer and held it out; while Tony’s hand dithered over the tray she smiled at him with happy patience, quite unforced, a whole spectrum away from the acid genialities of Mrs. Dalby’s coffee mornings. At last the boy selected a crescent-shaped biscuit and took a reluctant nibble at one of its horns.

  “Up,” he said.

  “You want to go upstairs, Tony?” said Mrs. Dixon-Jones.

  “Up,” he affirmed.

  “Oh, Tony, not yet! You’re not ready!”

  “Tired.”

  “Now, Tony, Jennifer is six months older than you, and she’s stayed with us. You can sleep on the sofa as long as you like. I won’t ask you to do any duties if you don’t feel like it.”

  Tony turned slowly away, and Pibble saw Mrs. Dixon-Jones relax from her sudden, inexplicable distress. The boy was almost past him when he turned again.

  “Man,” he said.

  “Yes. Mr. Pibble,” said Mrs. Dixon-Jones.

  “Help you,” said Tony, speaking so slowly that he had time to take a breath between the two words. Smiling, he shambled out. Mrs. Dixon-Jones nipped across the room and shut the door before Pibble could leave behind him.

  “Please sit down,” she said.

  He did so, and watched her return to her desk and push its bric-a-brac into a new pattern. Then she lit a tiny cork- tipped cigarette, watched the match burn for a while before blowing it out and laying it neatly on the rim of the ashtray, and at length gave a tinny, uncomfortable laugh.

  “Oh, dear,” she said. “I’m afraid you’ll think us very silly and superstitious. One gets into the habit of paying attention to what they say—they say so little, you see, and when they do comment on anything outside their immediate needs it seems like a, well, sort of sign. I wouldn’t bother if I were clear in my own mind, but they don’t seem to bother either then. It’s when you’re in a dither, if you see what I mean …”

  Pibble felt awkward for her. She spoke with such difficulty, so many sighs between clauses. Perhaps she really did hate lying, and also hated having to parade to a stranger the truth about a strong and secret irrational motive.

  “They said quite a lot when they let me in,” he said. “They seemed more on-the-spot than I’d expected.”

  “On-the-spot?”

  “Well, shrewd.”

  “Oh, that’s quite different. What did they say?”

  “The girl said, ‘Cold hands, warm heart’ when I shook hands with the boy—I suppose my face showed how surprised I was—and they argued twice about who should bring me to find you.”

  “‘The exercise will do you good,’” said Mrs. Dixon-Jones.

  “Yes.”

  “Those are both things they’re always saying. Our children, Mr. Pibble, come from rather underprivileged homes. Doctor Kelly has worked out an interesting theory about that. He thinks that the disease may be hereditary, with a mild and an acute form, and the acute form only occurs very rarely, so that no one has yet spotted that it’s hereditary, but the families with the mild form tend to be rather slow and stupid anyway, and so to be, well, not actually deprived, but warehousemen and lorry drivers and so on. People like that, you know …”

  A benign glance assured Pibble that she wasn’t for the moment including him among people like that.

  “. . . people like that always say the same thing when the same situation occurs. Proverbs and clichés and so on. All our children have heard their mothers laughing off the coldness of their touch or coaxing them not to lie around sleeping all day—again and again. You see?”

  She was genuinely likable when she talked about the children, likable but dismal. Pibble wondered what was so horrible about Tony’s going upstairs.

  “You have to keep remembering that they aren’t at all clever,” said Mrs. Dixon-Jones. “We can’t measure their IQ because all the tests send them to sleep, but Doctor Kelly says they’d be about sixty-five, and now Doctor Silver thinks even lower. He’s keeping a record of every word they say, and among them they seem to have a vocabulary of less than three hundred words.”

  “But it wasn’t all clichés and proverbs,” said Pibble.

  “Oh.”

  “They said something about my being a policeman when I came in. Had you told anyone that?”

  “Of course not.”

  In three syllables her voice had lost its warmth.

  “And when we passed the sofa they said Tony was fishing for yellow fish in dirty water. At least—”

  He was interrupted by the loud tap of her pen on the globe. She had pulled her features into their bony command, and now honed the cutting edge onto her accent.

  “It has been nice to meet you, Mr. Pibble, but we mustn’t sit here gossiping, must we? I’m sure we both have things to do.”

  Obedient to the crack of the whip, Pibble stood on his hind legs.

  “Well …” he began to say.

  She looked at him. Mouth and nostril and chin were implacable, but her eyes despaired. He saw how soft she really was, a shell-less crab scuttling in and out of the social carapace left by a dead creation. He smiled at her eyes and sat down.

  “You can’t leave it there, can you?” he said. “I’d be much more likely to talk, and I can see it would be hell for you if it got into the papers. You’d be smothered with cranks from all over the world.”

  She said nothing, but carefully stubbed out her cigarette
, tipped the contents of the ashtray into her wastepaper basket, and started to wipe the ashtray clean with a tissue.

  “I won’t even tell Mary,” he said. “Then there’s this other thing—too much money all of a sudden.”

  “I wasn’t talking to Lady Sospice about that.”

  “No. But I think that’s what you felt I might be able to help you about. I expect you were talking to Lady Sospice about Mr. Costain and our Preservation Society—the busybodies you mentioned just now. I’ve read something in the local paper about their being interested in the house. But if Mary had actually heard what you were saying there wouldn’t have been any misunderstanding, and I’m quite sure that you wouldn’t have let yourself be cornered into fixing an interview with me if there hadn’t been something you felt you might want to talk to an ex-policeman about. It’s usually money. Then you changed your mind, but you still aren’t really sure.”

  “For a charity, Mr. Pibble, there’s no such thing as too much money.”

  “But a sudden surplus is difficult to digest. I think I’m right in saying that until recently you were always short of funds. Your own job seems to include both money raising and keeping track of the children’s diet. A richer organization—”

  “We’ve advertised for a matron.”

  “But you haven’t had one for some time.”

  “Only two months.”

  “Another thing: I imagine that a year ago the whole building was decorated like this room, but now you can afford to paint and repaint the passage outside for experimental purposes. And I doubt if the hall carpet cost less than a thousand quid, or if the Preservation Society sanctioned that design, let alone paid for it. And all those tape recorders …”

  Mrs. Dixon-Jones had stopped tapping the globe and was biting the end of her pen with a look of innocent bewilderment, like a schoolgirl in an examination trying to remember at least one fact about the Venerable Bede.

  “I don’t know why you should think that any of this concerns you,” she said, with a sudden pulse of patrician spirit.

  “It doesn’t,” said Pibble, “unless you ask me to concern myself. But I think it’s possible that you are uneasy about some aspect of this money, where it’s coming from or where it’s going to, but that you aren’t sure of your facts or don’t want to risk upsetting the children …”

  “At least I don’t have to worry about that.”

  “I’d have thought—”

  “It’s very difficult to upset them about anything.”

  “Well, that’s a comfort.”

  “Less than you might think. Oh, Mr. Pibble, I don’t know what to say. Will you just take it that since you came something has happened which makes it impossible to ask you to help me?”

  “OK. Let’s leave it at that. We’ve made contact now, so you can always send for me if you change your mind. Give a note to Reuben Kelly, or ring the Black Boot in Kipling Street and leave a message for me to get in touch with you. Kelly and I usually have a drink there before lunch, but I won’t talk to him about this, or Mary, so there’s no danger of it getting back onto the coffee­-morning­ circuit. I needn’t tell you that if you have any solid evidence­ of something criminal you have a duty to get in touch with the police, though you’d be wise to consult a solicitor first. I imagine the McNair has a solicitor.”

  “Of course—” began Mrs. Dixon-Jones. The door lock clicked. Her features frosted. A big voice was speaking from the corridor before a face showed.

  “Posey, my sweetie, are you hiding a policeman from me?”

  “Come in, Ram,” sang Mrs. Dixon-Jones.

  The man had gleaming olive skin, gray hair, gray beard topped by the downturned moustache of the mod intellectual. White dustcoat worn with such a swagger that it looked like his national dress. A large, thickset, beaming man—a truly noble presence. The room seemed to diminish but to become more exotic as he came through the door.

  “A policeman?” cried Mrs. Dixon-Jones. “Are you a policeman, Mr. Pibble?”

  She managed the note of surprised badinage very well, for a woman who hated lying.

  “I used to be,” said Pibble, “but I retired two months ago.”

  “Glorious news!” said the newcomer. “You lost your hat! Hallelujah! My name is Rameses Silver, and I am joint head of research in this setup. Kelly researches the bodies and I research the souls. Now let me tell you, Mr. Pribble, that you, all unknowing, are part of a breakthrough in knowledge which is going to shake the entire medicobiological establishment to its cracked foundations.”

  “It’ll make a change from fruit flies,” said Pibble.

  “His name is Pibble,” said Mrs. Dixon-Jones. “No r. I wish you wouldn’t do that.”

  “Great! Great!” said Dr. Silver. “My apologies, Mr. Pibble. Now listen. When you came this morning, was it the first time you had been to the McNair?”

  “Yes.”

  “Have you had any previous contact with any cathypnic children or any of the staff here?”

  “No.”

  “What type of vehicle did you arrive in?”

  “I walked from the bus stop.”

  “Fine. Now—”

  “Perhaps policemen have a distinctive walk,” said Mrs. Dixon-Jones.

  “Good point, Posey! You’re learning fast. They could have heard him, seen him.”

  “The door’s very thick,” said Mrs. Dixon-Jones, “and the windows are some distance from where they stand. I’ve never seen any of them looking out of it when they’re on door duty. They usually sit back to back on the floor.”

  “First point good,” said Dr. Silver. “Make a note for Doll to have the door tested for audiopenetrability, Posey. Second point doubtful. Subjective. Not susceptible of proof, sweetie. Let’s go on from there. You knocked, Mr. Pibble? You rang? There’s no sound on the tape.”

  “The door opened before I could do either.”

  “Good, good. Who opened it?”

  “Two of the children. A boy called George and a girl with red hair.”

  “Fancy,” said Mrs. Dixon-Jones. “Honestly, the names some parents saddle their children with.”

  “Correct!” chanted Dr. Silver. “George Harrowby and Fancy Phillips. How long did they look at you before they said their first words?”

  “I don’t think they can have seen me at all. One of them said, ‘Hello,’ and the other one said, ‘Copper’ and ‘Lost his hat,’ while the door was still between me and them. Then they shut it and we introduced ourselves and they had an argument about who should bring me here, and then George appeared to faint, and—”

  “Sure, sure,” said Dr. Silver. “Pardon me, but that’s not on the tape, so it’s not evidence.”

  He settled himself on the corner of Mrs. Dixon-Jones’s desk with his back to Pibble and made rapid notes on a scribbling pad. When he had finished he sighed and stared at the paper, scratching as he did so at the back of his neck under the shorn grizzle.

  “Have you heard the other tape?” Pibble said “They talked about Tony when he was sleeping on the sofa.”

  “Flimflam,” said Dr. Silver. “We get a load of that sort of material, but Tony can’t or won’t remember what he was dreaming about, so there’s no check.”

  “But two of them talked about it at the same time.”

  “Not good enough,” said Dr. Silver, shaking his stately head. “It may have impressed you, being there, but that’s subjective. My target is a professional scientist, sitting at his desk and reading about an experiment in a scientific journal. This chappie would prefer to believe that any experiment in the field of parapsychology must be either a failure or a fraud. Then he reads my paper and he’s convinced.”

  “Put the children in separate rooms,” suggested Pibble, “with the sleeper in the middle one and—”

  Dr. Silver’s big actorly laugh stopped
him.

  “Great! Great! That’s the first experiment I set up, naturally. It’s the classic approach. Except that it doesn’t work. You show any interest in the kids’ abilities—or you don’t even show it, but it’s there—and they blank off. We call it feedback because it’s great to have a technical sounding name for phenomena you don’t understand, get it? But maybe we’re right, copper. Maybe the mental stimulus of the researcher’s interest is enough to jam the brain waves …”

  “Groups of children,” suggested Pibble. “No researchers, only tape recorders to listen to what they say about the sleeper.”

  “Good try again. We got some results that way, but not significant. Put two or three cathypnics together, and one of them will curl up and sleep while the others listen to his dreams. Too, their dreams seem to be mostly abstract, the way abstract art is abstract. And even when they dream representational, a mighty lot happens in ten seconds’ dreaming for kids with that size vocabulary to comment on. It looks easy, but it’s not. Four months I’ve been sitting on my arse trying to figure out a way to beat the intelligence of a gang of mental defectives—”

  “They’re not!” said Mrs. Dixon-Jones very sharply indeed.

  “Sure, Posey, sure,” said Dr. Silver with an affable lack of agreement. “They’re as nice a bunch of kids as you’re likely to meet, but for research material into parapsychic phenomena give me revolting college students any day. But hallelujah, we’ve a breakthrough this morning. Two breakthroughs. Notebook, Posey. Get on to Wallace Heaton and have them send a man down. I want a cine-camera permanently trained on the inside of the door, linked with one covering the drive, so that they can both be triggered by a photoelectric cell at the gates. I want the film to carry a time indicator in each case, ditto tape recorder G, so I’ve proof of the simultaneity of the record. No, scrap recorder G, and we’ll have a mike at the door and sound track on the film. Get it?”